[SlideShare] The future of the internet is in developing economies

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The internet may have been born decades ago in the West, but its
future might well play out primarily in developing countries. This
is, at least, the analysis that Yiibu, the multinational user experience
design and consulting firm, has put forward in a recent SlideShare presentation.

If the future of the internet is happening in developing
countries, it’s first because these are still untapped markets.
While countries in the developed market are already saturated –
internet penetration is over 80% in countries like Canada, Germany,
and South Korea – most of Asia and Africa have rates below 40%
(many under even 20%). People in these markets account for a
major part of the three billion humans that have yet to use the
internet, according to the SlideShare.

And they’re getting into the race at a rapid pace. In 2014,
almost half of commercial web traffic data provider Alexa's list of top 20 most visited
websites in the world came from fast-growing emerging economies
such as China, India, and Russia. And as smartphones designed for
emerging economies are getting increasingly cheaper, the number of
people who can afford internet access is skyrocketing. Imagine how
things will look in a few years, when these markets catch up.

For all these new users, the internet doesn’t look as it did to
those who started surfing the web a decade ago. Now, everything is
social, P2P, m-commerce and e-commerce, and for those internet
users who are not held back by the outdated desktop setup and 1.0
internet habits, things are different. “With little baggage to
weigh them down, they can ignore what’s ‘normal’ and turn
constraints into opportunities,” Yiibu says in the SlideShare
presentation.

For emerging markets, innovation is set free, argues Yiibu.
“What may seem futuristic to us, may merely feel practical to
others.”

What follows are ways in which people in emerging markets use
the internet differently from those in developed countries:

Social networks are e-commerce

The presentation uses Kuwait as an example, where some merchants
use Instagram to exchange sheep or dried fruit, as well as
Thailand, where Facebook powers more than 10,000 small businesses.
Ever more frequently, merchants in emerging markets make deals on
WhatsApp or through comments or messages on social media, and
entrepreneurs manage everything through their mobile, even outdated
dumb phones, on which they don’t have to bother with online payment
or forms.

Bypass the middleman

Another playground for small business is the marketplace. While,
in the United States, 76% of online retail involves individual
merchants, in China, 90% of online retail is sold through online
marketplaces. The largest marketplace is Alibaba’s Tmall, which has garnered more than 180
million customers, 150,000 merchants, and 200,000 well-known
brands, including Apple, Peugeot and even Lamborghini. Its C2C
version Taobao
enables consumers sell products and services online.

Multi-platform marketing

E-commerce can also take the form of blogs, highlights Yiibu.
The presentation takes an affluent Chinese girl named Jing as an
example. She started blogging about her life and style while
studying abroad in the UK. Her Taobao shop offers copies of her
luxury products that she promotes on her blog and sells on Taobao
within hours.

New e-payment paradigms

In China, virtual wallet and e-payment are concepts everyone
understands, thanks to the messaging app-turned-platform WeChat,
which offers these services. In countries such as Kenya, India, and
the Philippines, it’s
services like M-PESA that are ruling e-payment thanks to its
SMS-powered payment and wire services.

Back in China, Alibaba has found a way to increase trust: its
online payment platform Alipay acts as an escrow service and only
releases payment once goods have been received and accepted by
shoppers.

Offline / online continuity

While QR codes have failed to convince mature internet users –
who find them too complicated – they’re everywhere in China, having
been popularized by WeChat which generates a QR code for each
account. Each user can simply print its QR code on a business card,
poster, or a website, to redirect people to their account.

Rethinking delivery

In Africa, where many countries have an unreliable or
nonexistent postal service, the future of e-commerce could be
drones. “Why build expensive roads to remote rural locations when
drones can do the job just as well?” asked
Monty Munford in a recent Wired article documenting the
increasing buzz around the possibility of drone-enabled delivery in
sub-Saharan Africa.

Meanwhile, in Russia, fashion e-retailers send sales assistants
directly to shoppers’ homes, where they bring the clothes, wait for
customers to try them on, offer fashion advice, take returns, and
process payments on the spot.

Check out the entire SlideShare for more examples of innovative ways
emerging markets are reimagining how to do business.